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Goddard Statisically Proves Hansen Correct

Goddard, if I understand his comments correctly, has a theory using using school boy statistics that in his mind proves the recent record climate extremes are nothing to be concerned about, in fact they are to be expected. His theory also proves that unqualified bloggers should be ignored by rational people when it comes to thier pseudo-scientific analysis.

"If you have 3,000 weather stations and a 100 year long temperature record, you would expect about 30 of them to break their all-time record in the current year. The math is a bit tricky for climate scientists : 3,000 / 100 = 30."

He is right when he says;

"It is very basic statistics. If you have 100 random numbers, each number has one chance out of one hundred of being the largest."

So far so good for the school boy Math. But weather and therefore the data from weather stations isn't a simple case of random number generation. Only a portion of any result can be down to unknowns and uncertainty. The results ultimately depend on the laws of physics and chemistry; meteorological cycles, input conditions, natural forcing, changes in local environmental over both short and long times scales etc. If this was not true then weather could not be predicted even in the short term. All these factors and of course any anthropogenic forcing there may be ensures that any result is far from random.

But suppose Goddard is correct or he is just using an analogy - Totally randomly any weather station can be expected to break their long time record according to basic statistics - a roll of a many sided dice if you like. Then we would expect that as many record high temperatures as low temperatures. Goddard's 'very basic statistics' where each number has a chance of being the largest also means it has the same chance of being the smallest. Is that what we see?

The loaded Dice

So it looks like something has been biasing the random numbers in favour of warm records - I wonder what that could be? Something has been loading Goddard's climate dice - where have I heard that analogy before? Oh yes I remember, a paper by James Hansen et. al. "Climate Variability and Climate Change: The New Climate Dice", 10 November 2011;

"The "climate dice" describing the chance of an unusually warm or cool season, relative to the climatology of 1951-1980, have progressively become more "loaded" during the past 30 years, coincident with increased global warming. The most dramatic and important change of the climate dice is the appearance of a new category of extreme climate outliers. These extremes were practically absent in the period of climatology, covering much less than 1% of Earth's surface. Now summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (σ) warmer than climatology, typically cover about 10% of the land area."

Hansen has used the analogy before of a climate dice. From 1951 to 1980 the climate could be represented as a dice with two sides hotter than average, two cooler, and two around average. Currently Hansen's climate dice are loaded; four sides hot, and one side each for cool and average.

So as Goddard's 'very basic statistics' shows, what should be random has a warm bias, adding proof to Hansen's loaded climate dice analogy - Good Job!